Interface Implementation Started

You might already have heard that we are working on a major update for The West, called The West 2.0. This update will introduce lots of new and revised features into the game. Over the next couple of weeks, we will give you guys some interesting insights into the development process and keep you updated with the latest behind-the-scenes information. Our developers will regularly write new blog posts that you can either read here or on our The West Dev Blog. Today, Rainy is giving you some information about the new interface that we will introduce in The West 2.0.

We started last week with the implementation of the new interface and of course I will show you the first elements :) First of all, here is the new status bar with the standard information like bonds, money, deposit and nuggets. With the nugget button in the middle, you will get to the premium window to activate or longer premium bonuses. With the plus button in the nuggets label, you will be redirected to the premium buy window.

We have a new bottom bar with buttons for the common windows. There are 4 kinds of buttons: normal, non-active if a feature is not available yet (for example crafting before you reach level 20 or town button before you are a member of a town), hover, if you mouse over and active, if a window is already opened.

Last element for this week is the chat. This is how the chat looks, if you login into the game. It just shows you, how many friends are online and if you got some new friend requests or chat messages. If there are new chat messages or friend-requests, the button will start to blink. To see chatrooms and friends, you will need to open that box (I will show the opened box view in the next blog post).

We are very very busy at this point of development; we have already a little delay. There is a lot of JavaScript code which has to be changed, because we will finally get rid of mootools. There are also a lot of changes in backend, for example changes for storing and loading the new map, chat improvements, daemon improvements. We are very excited, how the 2.0 version will perform on client machines and on our servers, because we invested a lot of time in optimization of code in the 2.0 development.

On the graphical side, the new map is nearly finished. There is one map editor left, who does the finishing at the moment.

The internal beta version is planned for the beginning of next week. It is a very hard deadline, but we will do our best.